ON THE WAY TO THE BIRTH OF THEPHARAONIC STATE, THE PREDYNASTIC FUNERARY

DATA AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO OURUNDERSTANDING OF EARLY EGYPT

JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS

Uruguayan Institute of Egyptology

(Full text version)

I’ll start by quoting from the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created theheaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void and darkness wasupon the face of the deep”.

We can hardly conceive a better description for the state of our knowledge at theend of the XIX century about ancient Egypt before the time of the great pyramids.

Besides the sketchy and superficial notions transmitted to us by the classicalauthors, like for instance that the first king of Egypt, Menes, after living for anumber of years had been killed by a hippopotamus1, there was little else to sayexcept that a great darkness had descended over the millennia before the OldKingdom.

It was a time that belonged to the realm of myth, when the gods had ruled overmankind, perhaps to hide the fact that Egypt had no settled population and was stillwaiting for the dynastic race that would bring permanent human occupation andcivilization to the fertile Nile Valley.

This was the widespread notion that found its way into the academic books2 andwhen at the end of the XIX century the remains of the missing early population ofEgypt started to emerge from the ground, a whole world of new informationbecame available, although unfortunately, it was not at first correctly understood.

1 W. Waddel and F. Robbins, Manetho, Aegyptiaca, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, 27-29.2 G. Maspéro, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, Paris, 1876, 13, 54-60.

Petrie, for instance, thought that the prehistoric cemeteries he discoveredbelonged to a New Race that had invaded Egypt at the time between the VI and XIdynasties3, a concept that De Morgan had already shown to be wrong4, somethingthat Petrie had to concede a few years later.

In the first half of the XX century the concept that foreigners had invaded Egypt atthe end of the 4th millennium BC and civilized the backward native population waswidely accepted. It made sense in a world where big colonial empires still ruledvast areas of the globe and in which pushing this situation far into the past justifiedsuch a reality. The most likely origin for these invaders was Mesopotamia and asWinkler, a German archaeologist working in Egypt at the time between the twogreat wars suggested, the Wadi Hammamat was the most likely route to reach theNile Valley from the Red Sea.

To what an extent ideology shaped these approaches to the study of early Egyptis exemplified by the discovery by Winkler, while he was recording rock art in thewestern and eastern deserts, of swastikas, perhaps left behind by those Aryanswho long ago had, riding their horses, brought civilization to this region of Africa.

Winkler ended his publication of the desert rock art telling us that it was riderswho carried out this great work, destroying kingdoms and founding empires5.

3 W. Petrie, Naqada and Ballas, London, 1896, 61.4 De Morgan, Recherches sur les origines de l’Égypte, Paris, 1896.5 H. Winkler, Rock Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt, London, 2 Vols., 1938-1939.

Although Winkler has been described as not having been supportive of the naziregime in Germany, the basic facts are that as an archaeologist he had a choice ofwhat to publish of the vast collection of rock art he had assembled. If he had beencritical of the current regime in his country, he could have omitted those irrelevantswastikas from his academic publication. He held views on the origin of civilizationnot very different from what national socialist archaeology was publishing at thetime and also, when the Second World War began, he decided to return to hiscountry, while many other Germans remained abroad, fought in the Wehrmachtand died in action in 19456.

6 T. Wilkinson, Genesis of the Pharaohs, London, 2003, 25.

Another example of inaccurate conclusions drawn by the pioneers of Egyptianarchaeology when they were dealing with the earliest settled communities in theNile Valley is supplied by Junker, a German scholar who worked at Merimde,situated near the point where the two main branches that go into the Nile Deltameet7.

According to his results, the bodies of mainly small children had been buriedwithin the neolithic village, an uncommon practice in the rest of Egypt, as if theirloved ones had tried to keep them in close proximity to where they lived. This ideawas quoted in the literature for many years and surprisingly, even in somecontemporary publications8, when it had already been pointed out long ago9 thatJunker´s stratigraphy was incorrect and the burials had taken place after the villagehad been abandoned and then the location was used as a cemetery. Those whostill mention Junker´s views on this as valid fail to realize that in no case suchgraves were in close proximity to dwellings, thus defeating the very meaningassigned to these burials.

Finally, the famous sequence date system of relative dating developed at thebeginning of the XX century and used for 50 years10, a brilliant accomplishment,suffered nevertheless of various shortcomings which led to its replacement by abetter conceived system11 which is the one currently used by egyptologists.

Over the last one hundred and twenty years almost ten thousand predynastictombs excavated in Egypt throw light on the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization.This work not only filled a vacuum that had forced authors at the time to start theirbooks on the beginning of ancient Egypt with the pyramid age but also helpedcorrect views that although popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, werein fact a prejudiced distortion of the way in which the Egyptians had started toadvance on the path that would create one of the earliest and greatest civilizations.

Just as the funerary practices of the dynastic period offer insights into the lives,expectations and beliefs of the living, the funerary predynastic data provides evenmore important information at a time in which no written sources can enlighten usas to the hopes, beliefs and living conditions of the people who lived in Egyptbetween six thousand and five thousand years ago12.

7 H. Junker, Vorläufiger Bericht ... Merimde Benisalame (Westdelta), Vienna, 1929.8 D. Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt, Cambridge, 2006, 30.9 B.Kemp, Merimda and the theory of house burial in prehistoric Egypt, Chronique d’Égypte 85,1968, 22-33.10 W. Petrie, Diospolis Parva, London, 1901.11 W. Kaiser, Stand und Probleme der ägyptischen Vorgeschichtsforschung, ZÅS 81, 1956, 87-109;S. Hendrickx, The relative chronology of the Naqada culture: problems and possibilities, in A.Spencer (ed.), Aspects of Early Egypt, London, 1996, 36-69.12 J. J. Castillos, A reappraisal of the published evidence on Egyptian Predynastic and EarlyDynastic cemeteries, Toronto, 1982.

A problem that has plagued egyptology for over a century in the study of earlyEgypt is the excessive emphasis on mortuary data. It is perhaps understandablethat at a time when scientific archaeology was in its infancy, the very complexexcavation of villages and towns was generally avoided with the result that ourunderstanding of the earliest communities in the Nile Valley was largely based onconclusions drawn from the realm of the dead.

From this point of view, the results obtained after the excavation of almost tenthousand early graves, both in Upper and Lower Egypt, have provided a picture ofconstant development, which through one thousand years led to increasing socialstratification, the appearance of hereditary chiefdoms, then of regional kings andfinally of a unified Egypt under the rule of the first pharaoh.

The last three decades of the XX century saw a very welcome change in thestudy of the beginning of ancient Egyptian civilization. The work of the pioneershad considerably increased our knowledge but by the middle of that century a kindof stagnation had brought to a halt such advances, not for lack of archaeologicalwork but rather of interpretative models that could satisfactorily explain theevidence that had been brought to light.

Part of the blame for this situation lies on the divorce that for many years existedbetween egyptology and other social sciences such as anthropology andsociology13. The attempts by some scholars in the first half of the XX century tointroduce elements of those sciences into egyptology14 had failed to gainacceptance and the approach had continued to be an antiquarian, particularist andelitist one, in which the museological interests prevailed, ancient Egypt had to beunderstood on its own terms, without bringing in examples from other cultures,which were seen as irrelevant and inapplicable to the Nile Valley and also with aheavy emphasis on the most elaborate and refined objects belonging to membersof the elite, rather than on the more abundant but less valuable artefacts belongingto the lower classes.

The appearance of what was then called the New Archaeology, changes withinthe other social sciences and a desire to break the stagnation brought about amost welcome renewal in egyptology, and especially in the quest for the origins ofthis civilization that inaugurated the current period of growth and diversification.

Since the subject of this Symposium is Death along the Nile, Uncovering theSecrets of Egypt's Lost Tombs, I would like to give two examples of early gravesthat for one or other reason have stood out from the many thousands I havestudied over the years.

The first one is a frequent type in most early cemeteries and the occupants werea young woman and a very small baby. When you deal extensively with mortuary

13 J. Lustig (ed.), Anthropology and Egyptology, A Developing Dialogue, Sheffield, 1997.14 A. Moret and G. Davy, Des clans aux empires, Paris, 1923.

evidence in search of patterns and regularities you tend to become jaded and inspite of being aware that each tomb contains a human tragedy, the end of a life, itall becomes a pit, bones, artefacts and their peculiar arrangement which youproceed to register and interpret following a scientific methodology in order to try tounderstand the intentions of the ancient people you are studying.

It is all like the very common complaint today about medical doctors not havingenough empathy with the plight of their patients and treating them almost like withan assembly line mentality. Although in many cases this reflects a reality, weseldom realize that when doctors have to deal almost every working hour of theirday with disease, pain and death, a way to survive and keep helping peopleovercome their illnesses is to detach ourselves of the misery surrounding us anddo our job as well as we can but without getting too emotionally involved.

In archaeology a similar situation arises and if we want to do our job efficiently wecannot dwell too much on the misadventures of people long gone which wehappen to be studying, something we can and perhaps also we must indulge inafter the work is done as part of the general picture we are conveying.

But I must confess that every time I was confronted in my research with thesegraves containing the bodies of a young woman and her small child, I have notbeen able to avoid a moment of reflection and grief for two young lives cut so shortperhaps because of the dangers of childbirth thousands of years ago,

In this case and in spite of the tomb having been robbed in antiquity, there wasevidence that both bodies had been wrapped in matting, it was a large elite tombthat had been originally endowed with many objects for the afterlife.

I would also like to add that a very common dictum in the sense that prostitution isthe oldest profession is quite wrong. In fact, tomb robbing was and there isevidence of this practice in Egypt as early as six thousand years ago. Graves wererobbed very shortly after the burial took place and those responsible for the deedseemed to know exactly were to dig to get to the most valuable items15. Althoughthere must have been terrible penalties for such a crime, greed being such apowerful human drive, nothing could prevent that most of the predynastic tombs inEgypt have come to us in such a condition.

The second example I would like to bring to your attention has to do with theaffection we feel today for the small animals we share our life with. In my case mywife and I live with eight cats, a family we decided not to separate and who hasgrown old surrounded by comfort and safety. As those of you who share a similarexperience with cats as pets know very well, they are the ones who run the house,I am merely their butler and my wife their maid.

Most people think that this special kind of relationship with our pets is somethingbelonging to modern times, when an increased sensitivity and compassion,besides other characteristics of modern life, have made such kind of closerelationship possible.

But in fact we can find examples of this thousands of years ago in early Egypt.For instance in a Naqada II tomb at Matmar, number 312816, a large elite burial stillcontaining 40 pots and many other objects was found to contain the body of a manand that of a dog, probably his favourite pet or hunting companion. The unusualdetail was that the body of the man was found inside the remains of a wickerworkcoffin but the dog was buried inside a wooden box made of thick boards, in thecase of human occupants an infrequent mark of high status at the time.

Beyond the cultural differences between those ancient people and us, cases suchas these two remind us of how in certain aspects we feel closer to them than itwould seem possible given the many other circumstances that place them inanother kind of world far away from our own today.

Now I would like to briefly discuss some examples of recent discoveries in thearchaeology of early Egypt.

At Adaïma in Upper Egypt both predynastic dwelling areas and cemeteries havebeen properly excavated and published which allows us to compare the resultsfrom those different contexts and validate or modify previous conclusions basedmostly on funerary data17.

15 W. Petrie, Naqada and Ballas, London, 1896, 9.16 G. Brunton, Matmar, London, 1948, 16.17 B. Midant-Reynes and N. Buchez, Adaïma, 2 Vols., Cairo, 2002.

At Hierakonpolis18 a team of scholars has made significant discoveries that throwimportant new light on the place that was one of the centres of political andeconomic power in predynastic Egypt.

The discovery, among many others, of the earliest brewery in Egypt dating backto Naqada II times, of the graves of two elephants, as well as that of other animals,perhaps an expression of the control exercised by the local regional rulers over thechaotic world of nature, the discovery of evidence for the superstructure of an elitepredynastic tomb, a poorly known aspect of funerary data and many other bits ofextremely interesting information together with the valuable conservation work theyare doing to preserve the ancient local funerary palace of king Khasekhemuy of theSecond Dynasty (the so-called Fort), speak of the results this work has alreadybrought about to improve our understanding of ancient Hierakonpolis.

18 R. Friedman, Excavating Egypt’s early kings, in B. Midant-Reynes and Y. Tristant (eds.), Egypt atits Origins 2, Leuven, 2008, 1157-1194.

In the Delta the work in many sites provides evidence to show that Lower Egyptwas far from being the backwater at this time that many previously thought it wasand Tell el Farkha is a good example19.

What was perhaps the second oldest brewery in Egypt was found there as well asremains of a settlement, cultic buildings, dwellings, tombs of which the elite onesexhibit a degree of wealth that rival the richest found in Upper Egypt, gold platedimages of local rulers who enjoyed the benefits of the trade with Western Asia.

19 K. Cialowicz, The nature of the relation between Lower and Upper Egypt in the PredynasticPeriod, A View from Tell el-Farkha, in B. Midant-Reynes and Y. Tristant (eds.), Egypt at its Origins2, Leuven, 2008, 501-513.

As you can see from what I have been saying here, I am confident that everyyear, every decade will bring about dramatic new discoveries that will help fill manyof the gaps we still have in our knowledge of the origins of ancient Egyptiancivilization.

We live indeed in exciting times.